[Illustration: _Years later, perhaps in 1868, a French artist seems to have used the Englishman’s sketch as a model for one of his own, below, making mountains of the hills._] Roughly the size of Warsaw, Stockholm, Singapore, and Naples, of Bucharest and Brussels and Munich, Houston is prosaically listed in the Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia—the Soviet Encyclopedia—of 1957 as a “Railway and airline junction. Important industrial, commercial, and financial center in the South of the USA.” Even an American encyclopedia is hardly expected to describe the city’s festival atmosphere, its spirit of play, which derives in part from a surprising characteristic described by Arthur C. Evans, a man well seasoned in life, who wrote: “I tried to think of Houston as being masculine. It wouldn’t do. Houston is not a masculine city in the sense that New Orleans or San Francisco is masculine. And so, for me, at any rate, it is _Miss_ Houston, a beguiling, vibrant, radiantly healthy adolescent—and I love her.” Houston, Promised Land or New Golconda or whatever writers say of it, is a city of great expectations. Ambitious, confident, it moves swiftly, restlessly. Its profile, a transfiguring skyline moored to the flat Gulf plain, vaguely resembles other modern skylines, but Houston resembles nothing in the world except itself. Ever since World War II the city has beguiled observers, who often approach it with preconception, and often leave it with surprise. “Air conditioned Tower of Babel, anchored on gold, gall and guts,” the author James Street wrote of it. “An adolescent Amazon with a little gland trouble.” “It is plain Simon-pure American inspiration,” the _American_ Magazine said of it. It “has a strength and power and rude majesty all its own,” the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_ said. “In time, perhaps, it will achieve greatness.” _What arrests the visiting journalist, what does he sense about Houston that residents often fail to feel?_ Let us see. [Illustration: _President John F. Kennedy standing beside a full-scale model of the Apollo lunar landing vehicle, which was shown for the first time during the President’s inspection of the Manned Spacecraft Center in September, 1962._] 2 [Illustration: _City Seal (Enlarged)_] The ship channel, Oil, and Two World Wars made Houston what it is. The second age of discovery may make it what it becomes. As Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others opened the unexplored seas and lands of the earth during the first age of discovery, so the men who are opening the unexplored space of the universe have begun the second age.